How To Improve Your Sales Funnel

November 25, 2013

Just about every business has a sales funnel, and improving its sales funnel to improve the effectiveness of how it converts people into paying clients can mean the difference between life and death for a business. In this article I will explain what a sales funnel is, and how you can improve the sales funnel of your business.

What Is A Sales Funnel

A sales funnel is the series of steps that a person must take from the time when they first learn about your business to the time when they become a paying client.

When you are marketing your business and getting the word out about your business, you probably send people to your website or a physical store. That initial point where you tell people to go is the top of your sales funnel. And once people get to the top of your sales funnel, you need to have very clear goals for what you want those people to do. Those goals are called your conversion.

How To Improve The Sales Funnel

What you want to do, of course, is to optimize that path that a person takes from learning about your business to becoming a paying client. Most of the time, the top of your sales funnel will be your website.

Measure Everything To Optimize Your Sales Funnel

Once you have a site where you can drive people to, what you need to do is use Analytics to measure and understand what those website visitors are doing on your site. If you are not familiar with web analytics, you definitely need to be. It is generally free and will help your business quite a bit. Here is a tutorial on why using web analytics is so important.

Web analytics will help you understand what people are doing when they come to every page of your website. As far as you are concerned, you need those website visitors to go to the next step in the sales funnel from whichever page your website visitors are on. So with analytics, you will be able to see whether people are making it to the next part of the sales funnel, and at what rate they are doing that.

Test Everything To Optimize Your Sales Funnel

By now you may be asking how you can increase the rate at which people move forward through the sales funnel. What you have to do is define a clear call to action (usually a big button somewhere) letting people know that this is where they need to go. And once you have added your call to action, try experimenting with where on that page the call to action should be.

The best way to experiment is to use something called AB testing. Here is a video tutorial on what is AB testing and how you can use AB testing to help you improve each step in your sales funnel.

Create Landing Pages

Landing pages are a great tool to help you minimize the steps in your sales funnel, and therefore increase conversion of website visitors to buyers. Landing pages are specific pages you can create on your site, which have a single and clear call to action, which is usually to move the visitor to a pretty advanced step in the sales funnel.

Once you have such pages set up, and AB tested, you can then drive people to those landing pages. With landing pages, you can also measure success of conversion more accurately. So methods like direct marketing become a more useful tool for you.